Parker McKenzie

Parker Paul McKenzie (* November 15, 1897 near Rainy Mountain, † March 5, 1999 in Mountain View ) was an American linguist.

He came in 1897 in a teepee near Rainy Mountain in the Indian Territory to the world. In Washita River he received baptism for Baptists. His parents were Kiowa Indians and reported McKenzie 1904 in the Rainy Mountain Kiowa Boarding School at. There was a duty to speak English, who, however, the language of the Kiowa used, the threatened corporal punishment. He then attended the Phoenix Indian Boarding School, Union High School, the Lamson College and the Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical.

When the Smithsonian Institution ethnologist John Peabody Harrington sent in 1918 to Oklahoma to study the language of the Kiowa, called this McKenzie to his employees. This took a decades-long scientific debate with the Kiowa began. Until now, it was a purely oral language. Together they developed a phonetic alphabet is still valid today. The results were published in the works Vocabulary of the Kiowa Language ( 1928) and Popular Account of the Kiowa Indian Language ( 1948). In the late 1940s, cooperation between Harrington and McKenzie found its culmination until in the 1950s the system could be perfected.

McKenzie never hit an academic career, but was 1920-1959 only typist in the Indians Monies Section of the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the Anadarko Agency. In his last years, we have close cooperation with Laurel Watkins, the 1984 described his work in A Grammar of Kiowa. His services to the Kiowa honored the University of Colorado in 1991 with the awarding of an honorary doctorate. On his 100th birthday was honored him with a ceremony at the Red Buffalo Hall of Kiowa Tribal Complex in Carnegie. McKenzie died in 1999 at the age of 101 years. After his death, he was inducted into the Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame.

Some compared his work with the Sequoyahs who developed the Cherokee alphabet. Not only scientific, but also in cultural terms, it must be appreciated: thanks to their texts were older speakers and words that are rarely used today, are preserved for posterity. He also translated works from English, including some 1986 Baptist hymns.

He was married to Nettie, whom he had known since high school, and had two daughters, Esther Hayes of Mountain View and Kathryn Collier of Wewoka.

  • Linguist
  • Indian
  • Americans
  • Born 1897
  • Died in 1999
  • Man
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